Aug 8, 2011

#BDS: Occupation profiteer #Ahava soaks up #EU science grants

"Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s commissioner for scientific research, recently acknowledged that the cosmetics-maker Ahava was allocated more than €1 million worth of innovation grants from the Union over a period stretching from 1998 to 2013. Giving even one cent to Ahava involves facilitating breaches of international law because of the firm’s unlawful activities in the West Bank.

As Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t appear to recognize this problem, she would be well-advised to read a report, issued in May, by the human rights organization B’Tselem. It highlights how Ahava is partly owned by two Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land: Mitzpe Shalem and Qalya. Both of those settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies."